Day tripping: Perpignan

Today was another continuation in the day tripping adventures. Cathy, Dawn and I enjoyed the great weather and sunshine (not to mention occasional 30 mph winds) in Perpignan. It's about a 2-hour train ride west of Montpellier, near the Spain border. Perpignan is the capital of the Catalan region. The Catalan language is, from my best estimation, a form of Spanish with French snippets. The pretty interesting thing about being in Perpignan was the fact that most street signs were in French and Catalan (which I mistook for Spanish for awhile until I realized that the word for street was not correctly written if it was Spanish).

We walked all over the city and really saw the majority of this great city rich in history and medieval-ness. :) We first visited the Casa Pairal which was a really great tower looking over the city and originally one of the city's gates and then a prison. Drinking a coffee under this arch was really amazing.
After that, we went to Cathedrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste (we weren't allowed to take pictures inside) which was under a lot of repair and restauration. After the cathedral, we tried to go into the Campo Santo, which is the only cloister cemetery in France. For whatever reason, everything was locked up even though they were supposed to be open so we just took a couple pictures though the gates.

Then we went to the Tourism Office to see if there were any cool things going on in the city. Nothing too exciting actually. We then headed to the Casa Xanxo. According to the city map/tourism info, this was supposed to be really cool with carvings of the 7 deadly sins on the outside of the house and a DO NOT MISS patio where there was a 3-D map of Perpignan. I can't tell you how disappointing and lame this Casa was. The 7 deadly sin carvings were pretty worn away and almost impossible to really make out since they were really far from the street level view. The 3-D map of Perpignan looked like a train set that had been built in about 1970. Bless the 2 women who wokred there that were overjoyed to have some people to talk to though. Apparently, according to one of the women at this Casa, next month they are decorating all the fountains in the city with flowers and there will be a fanfare following the mayor around as he speaks about the history of each fountain.

After the Casa, we went to lunch and had some pizza (Flamenkuche to be specific which are like really thin crust pizzas made with a cream sauce without tomatoes). Dawn had muscles and fries. :) We then headed to the Palais des rois de Mallorca (Palace of the Kings of Mallorca). This was most definitely the highlight of our day. We got to see amazing views of the city and even paid 2 euros to walk around inside this castle type building. It was built in 1276 and a great example of Gothic architecture. Though the inside of the building was a little lack luster (no furniture to really speak of, just rooms), we went to the very top of one of the towers as you can see below. It was SUPER windy but fun anyway.

Inside one part of the Palace, there was a huge exhibition on different religions popular in the area at various times in its history. Since we weren't in the mood for reading for 2 hours, we kind of just breezed through all the artifacts but they did have a big section on Judaism and I saw some Torah replicas even. Ooh!

Anyway, the ride home on the train was most entertaining as we were playing Uno the entire way and disrupting all the people around us. It was great fun.

Here's a link to all the pictures if you are interested:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jkimpfbeck/Perpignan#

Your British word lesson of the day: dummy = slang for pacifier. In a sentence: I think that dummy is cute. You should get it for your nephews.

Quotable Quotes:
Cathy on seeing a sign on a window: 25 Euros a day? I don't care what it is. I'll take it! (It was a sign for car rental)
Cathy on our walk into downtown from the train station: I wanna see something pretty. Not this crap. I've been here for 5 minutes.

By the way, apparently Perpignan considers their train station to be the center of the world. That's what the tourism map says. Perpignan train station : The Center of the World. Here's a picture of it. You be the judge.